The Cosmopolitan Idea and National Sovereignty

The Cosmopolitan Idea and National Sovereignty

Chapter:

(p.135)
10 The Cosmopolitan Idea and National Sovereignty

Source:

Cosmopolitanisms

Author(s):

Robert J. C. Young

Publisher:

NYU Press

DOI:10.18574/nyu/9781479829682.003.0011

Robert Young, whose incisive remarks provoked much of the thinking in the lectures from which some of these essays emerged, focuses on the unfinished business that remains between cosmopolitanism and national sovereignty. Can the nation-state, which is still relied on to guarantee the rights of individuals, stretch itself to protect the mobile, migratory, multiply-loyal subjects that nationalism has excluded but that are now so characteristic of our time? It is only in such embodiments, Young suggests, that the cosmopolitan idea truly exists—if indeed cosmopolitanism exists today as such an idea rather than a pressing series of unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions.

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